EVENTS

Daisy, daisy…

For instance, I have this vague recollection that Louis CK was funny, and that he had some insight into the human condition.

That memory is gone now.

Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.

I still have faint memories of hearing jokes like this in junior high school.

You know why Asian guys have small dicks? Cause they’re women, they’re not dudes. They’re all women. All Asians are women. And they have big clits, really big clits, and when they have sex they just stick their clits in each other’s pussies, and then they procreate using math. I can’t prove this, by the way, but I don’t have to.

But I don’t remember them ever being funny. When I was in junior high, there must have been a person who said it, but I don’t remember them. I was with a crowd of 13 year olds, someone must have laughed.

But I can’t remember it. Is this the onset of senility? Am I losing it?

The problem must be me. My mind. Louis CK was making millions of dollars as a comedian. He can’t be this cheap and unfunny. I must be losing my sense of humor, or my perspective.

I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a…fraid.

Comments

Back when Scienceblogs was on the old blogging engine (Movable Type), it was possible to include images if you knew the right HTML incantation. It didn’t get used that often, but sometimes, you just really, really, really need a good image of a facepalm.

Or double facepalm.

There doesn’t seem to be an image of an infinite fractal facepalm, but there should be.

I hate to mention it, but women with enlarged clitorises using them as substitute penises is a fetish for some people. This is the first time I’ve heard of the idea being used as a putdown of Asian men.

First he rants about the Parkland shooting survivors having the gall to advocate for stricter gun control simply because they don’t want anyone to suffer like they did, now this. Did he suffer some kind of personality-altering head injury, a la Phineas Gage?

I don’t think Louis CK was dumb, and I don’t think the scandals made him dumb. I therefore think that this is very intentional.
I listened to the opening of the leaked set – it was like 45min and I couldn’t get past the first 5min, which was just long enough to hear his bit about losing $30 million.
How do you make that back? Becoming the hero of the alt-right, Fox News crowd. His previous audience ain’t taking him back, especially after this. There are dollars available from the same sad-sacks that hang on Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson’s every utterance.

I have never liked ‘edgy’ standups like CK, as they rely on the fact that people laugh as if something is funny when actually it laughter induced by something outrageous or uncomfortable. I suppose it has to do with emotional release, or something deeply mental like that. Anyway, this kind of stuff works best in crowds and so people can laugh together. It is a form of “comedy” does not work one on one, and it sure don’t work in writing. Finally, it is very dangerous to do because it can backfire big time, as we are beginning to see.
I remember some years ago he did a bit on SNL about how great it must be to rape babies. The crowd was roaring. I was laughing, for squids’ sakes. It is weird how that works.

Oh, I have the answer to that. To quote Jim Jefferies from his bit Freedumb (full transcript here):

Now… I did that comedy routine, which is… I was joking just then. I did that in Australia, and they wrote a very nasty article about me with the headline, “You Cannot Joke About Rape.” – [grunts] – [audience laughing] Turns out you can. I just fucking did it. And I think we can all agree that I nailed it. [audience cheering and applauding] You can joke about anything. A joke doesn’t mean intent. It doesn’t mean you’ve actually done it. What this lady did was she wrote an article about me, and she did a transcript of the actual routine in the article, wrote down every word I said. Now, I hate this. And I’ll tell you why. Because my whole skill in life is being able to say horrible things and still seem likable. [audience laughing] You take the whole… [grunts] out of it. See, if you read my material… it’s a bad read. [audience laughing] If you just read, “As rapes go, they weren’t…” “Oh, my God!” See, then she started to write and say things like, “It is Jim Jefferies’ opinion that women should be happy when they’re drugged.” Not my opinion. It was a joke I said, not my opinion. Not something that I think, something that I think is funny. There is a big fucking difference between things that I think and things that I think are funny to say.

As for Louis CK… I never liked him much. He was almost always punching down, if that makes sense. If someone is vicious thug and you’re fine with that as long as he is thug to your enemies, you can’t just turn around when he starts being vicious thug towards people you consider your allies.

I do not have this recollection. I do have the recollection of people telling me that he was hilarious. Then pointing me also at that unfunny antivax atheist guy’s show (amazingly I have managed to blank out his name).

In the last CK thread, I wanted to post that Louis CK was never funny but I thought I didn’t want to get an argument. But he has never been funny. He has excellent delivery but he is not funny. You realize this when you write down your jokes. There is almost no wit about the jokes he makes. He does the very typical stand up comedian shit but with better delivery than most so people find him funny. And also swearing, cursing, and punching down. Apparently those things are also super funny.

Yeah, I can’t claim any superiority over this, but I’ve never found LCK funny either, not his stand up nor his TV show. I tried a couple of times with the show, but never got past the first episode. Just didn’t do anything for me.

That said, I am a fan of Better Things the Pamela Aldon led sitcom for which LCK has co-writer credits the first two season, but fortunately this really was always Aldon’s baby (it’s based on her life experiences), and season three begins next month without his involvement in any way.

I listened to the opening of the leaked set – it was like 45min and I couldn’t get past the first 5min, which was just long enough to hear his bit about losing $30 million.

jfc

Some years ago, I read an article in what is a pretty right-wing British newspaper. The gist of the article was that if one had a certain amount of money, one could invest it in pretty low-risk instruments and live on the proceeds, if not ostentatiously, then pretty comfortably. The figure given by the journalist was somewhere in the region of five million pounds. The intervening years, cost-of-living increases and the recession might have put a dent in that number but I doubt it’s changed by much. Accumulating five million pounds, or the equivalent in our respective local currency, is a pipe dream for most of us (though being a right-wing newspaper the implication was, of course, that it merely involved some vigorous Bootstrap-Pulling™)

But get a load of Louis CK, this absolute shitgoblin, this overweening, purulent swollen mass of self-regarding entitlement, this raging abscess on humanity’s perineum, expects us to feel sorry for him because he didn’t get to make $30m (well north of our magic £5m) last year because he got held to account for his intolerable behaviour?! Not just “I didn’t get to make $30m” either; “I didn’t get to make $30m more to add to the millions I already have! Weep for me!“. And there’s plenty of temporarily-embarrassed millionaires out there who probably will, pathetic resentful little men who wish they could get away with whacking off in front of women colleagues, and who refuse to realise that having an economy with people with multi-million annual incomes is a fucking bug, not a feature…

The only comedy special I’m interested in watching starring Louis CK is a little one I’m scripting called Louis CK Chokes On All The Cocks. It’s just Louis, a woman-only audience, and a 3-D printer. We’re gonna run us up a human-scaled copy of every damned pecker, wiener and wanger in creation starting with the arthropods, and damn it if we aren’t going to stop until he’s choked on them all…

This reminds me of the “Animal Lives” series (by the cartoonist who draws the Scandinavia and the World webcomic) which illustrates the many wonderful mating strategies that different species follow. And yes, hyenas are included.